Murder in a mill town (2 page)

That seemed to please Gracie, who stood and let Nell tidy her plaited hair so she’d look pretty for Viola. Buffing her right shoe against her stockinged left leg, the child said, “Doesn’t she know my name?”

“Yes.” Nell licked her fingertips to smooth down the stubborn little stray tendrils.

“Then why does she always call me ‘The Child’?”

For the same reason she called Gabrielle Bouchard, Mrs. Hewitt’s nurse, “The Negress.” To ignore a person’s name was to ignore—or deny—her very humanity. “She’s old,” Nell told Gracie as she retied her blue hair ribbon. “Old people forget things.”

“You’re old, and you don’t forget things.”

“I’m twenty-six. Mrs. Mott is...” Twice as old? Three times? “Much older.”

“No, no!” Gracie protested when Nell started to take off the ridiculous hat. “We not done.”

“Buttercup, Nana is downstairs waiting for—”

“Just till my line,” Gracie pleaded, reseating herself at the table.

“Oh, all right. Let’s see...” Adjusting her hat, she sat down and sang, “Up above the world you fly, like a tea-tray in the sky.”

Gracie lifted the Dormouse, played by a little mouse-shaped cast iron doorstop on the chair next to her, and made it move around a bit while making yawning sounds. In a squeaky mouse voice, she said, “Twinkle, twinkle, twinkle, twinkle...”

“Well, I’d hardly finished the first verse,” Nell continued, “when the Queen jumped up and bawled out, ‘He’s murdering the time! Off with his head!’”

Here came Gracie’s favorite line, delivered with a sniffy dispassion that would have done the most venerable Brahmin matron proud: “How dweadfully savage.”

*   *   *

Viola’s private withdrawing room in the Hewitt home—an imposing mansion on Tremont Street’s “Colonnade Row” section, facing Boston Common—was an Oriental-inspired haven furnished with exotic antiques and silken hangings in shades of vermilion, magenta, and cinnabar. The south wall was dominated by an immense seventeenth-century Japanese screen depicting a hawk in the snow against a sky of brilliantly burnished gold leaf. Before this wall, on the majestically carved Japanese chair that Nell called the “Lion Chair” and Gracie the “Thwone,” sat Viola Lindleigh Hewitt.

A tall, angular lady with lightly silvered black hair, Viola was the kind of female often described as “handsome.” She had on her bronze silk day dress this morning—sans crinoline, as always—ornamented with two armloads of bone and ivory bracelets. From the ease with which she reclined in the regal chair, one would never guess that her legs were all but useless, having withered away following a bout of infantile paralysis ten years ago. The only hint as to her infirmity would be the two ivory-handled folding canes hooked to the back of the chair.

“Nana!” Gracie squealed as Nell led her into the room. She launched herself—and the horde of dolls she’d hauled along to play with—onto Viola’s lap for the warm hug she knew she could always count on.

Across the room sat a middle-aged couple, their humble attire a striking contrast to the lush velvet couch on which they sat. What Nell could see of the woman’s hair beneath her shabby bonnet was like wiry steel that had been left out in the rain to rust. Her nose was ruddy, her eyes red-rimmed. In her hand she clutched a damp lavender handkerchief that Nell recognized as Viola’s.

The woman nudged the man, causing the tea in his cup to slosh onto the saucer. He shot her a look. She glanced at Nell and jerked her chin upward, whereupon he hauled himself to his feet, ducking his head in an unpracticed attempt at a bow. Black Irish he was, with pockmarked cheeks and outsized ears. Nell acknowledged the gesture with a nod and a reassuring smile. He glanced at his wife—there was no mistaking that this was a married couple—who motioned him back down.

“What a darlin’ little girl,” praised the woman. There was just a whisper of Ireland in her voice, an age-softened but unmistakable lilt. “Your granddaughter, ma’am?”

“I adopted her, actually,” Viola replied in her pleasantly sandy, British-accented voice. A deliberately misleading answer, of course, since Gracie really was her granddaughter. “Always did want a little girl—four sons will do that to you—and then, just when I’d accepted that I’d never have one, along came Gracie. One of the happiest days of my life.”

“Ah.” The woman’s uncertain smile betrayed her surprise that a lady of Viola Hewitt’s position would adopt a child; bloodlines meant everything in Boston society.

Easing the child down from her lap and turning her to face her callers, Viola said, “Gracie, this is Mr. and Mrs. Fallon.”

“How do you do?” said the child, who’d only recently overcome her shyness with strangers.

Mrs. Fallon displayed a mouthful of crooked teeth. “Why, ain’t you a regular little doll. Knows her manners, she does.”

“Thanks to Miss Sweeney.” Viola gestured Nell into the armchair next to her. As she took her seat, Nell noticed Mrs. Fallon appraising her over the rim of her teacup. Nell’s wardrobe, chosen and paid for by Viola, tended toward understated refinement, epitomized by today’s fashionably sleek dove gray dress, the sole adornment for which was Nell’s omnipresent gold pendant watch. Her auburn mane had been twisted this morning into a fat chignon secured by a pair of pearl-tipped hair picks—a gift from Viola for her birthday last month.

Mrs. Fallon looked as if she didn’t know quite what to make of a girl with an Irish surname who dressed so elegantly and held a position traditionally held by patrician young women from good families—meaning rich and Protestant—who’d found themselves in reduced circumstances. It was a look Nell was accustomed to; she’d learned to find it amusing.

“Mrs. Fallon,” Viola said as Gracie settled down at her feet, fiddling with her dolls, “why don’t you tell Nell what you’ve just told me.”

The Fallons stared at Nell, clearly as baffled as she as to why Viola had summoned her. “It’s our girl,” Mrs. Fallon said. “Our daughter, Bridie. Well, Bridget, really, but we call her Bridie.”

“
Her
daughter,” Mr. Fallon interjected, with a nod toward his wife; his brogue was stronger than hers. “My stepdaughter.”

In a low, strained voice, Mrs. Fallon said, “What godly difference does that make, Liam?”

He raised his hands in a placating gesture. “Just settin’ things straight.”

“
My
daughter, then. She turned up missing three days ago—Sunday it was. The coppers think she run off with her fella, but I know her better than that. She wouldn’t never just up and leave like that—never.”

Her husband cocked a skeptical eyebrow. Nell glanced at Gracie to see how much of this she was absorbing, but she seemed to be intent on trying to force a miniature baby bottle into the mouth of her favorite doll.

Mrs. Fallon slid a hard glance in her husband’s direction before continuing. “The cops, they won’t do nothin’, so we went to Mr. Harry, thinking they’d be sure to help if he told ‘em to, but he said it wasn’t none of his concern.”

Harry? Nell aimed a quizzical look at Viola. Harry Hewitt was the second eldest of her three remaining sons. The youngest, Martin, the last to still live at home, was pursuing his Masters in Divinity at Harvard University. Next oldest was the late Robbie, who died four years ago at the notorious Andersonville prison camp in Georgia. Viola’s eldest, Will, the black sheep, had been missing since his own stint at Andersonville, except for those brief weeks last winter when he resurfaced with a murder charge hanging over his head.

That left Harry, the wildly profligate middle son, to help run—if only nominally—his father’s two hugely lucrative businesses: Hewitt Shipping and Hewitt Mills and Dye Works. Harry served as general manager of the latter, an enormous textile factory just across the river to the north in Charlestown. In fact, he was more or less a figurehead; Nell would have been surprised if he knew any more about dying and weaving than she did. His father, August Hewitt, governed the more complex and demanding shipping concern.

“Mr. and Mrs. Fallon live in Charlestown, and Bridie works at the mill,” Viola explained. “That was why they thought Harry might be able to help.”

Able? Probably. Willing? Harry Hewitt cared about Harry Hewitt. By his own admission, there was little in life he deemed worthy of effort aside from the pursuit of simple animal gratification.
Once one has absorbed that essential truth,
he told her last winter, when they were still on speaking terms,
it’s actually quite liberating. The rules that keep others on a short leash don’t exist for you—as they shouldn’t, because they’re arbitrary and suffocating, most of them. Everything becomes possible. Nothing is taboo.

“We went to Mr. Harry’s office at the mill,” Mrs. Fallon said, “but like I said, he didn’t see where it was none of his business. He said if the cops thought she run off with Virgil, she probably did.”

Nell said, “Virgil...?”

“Hines.” Mrs. Fallon grimaced. “A handsome enough brute, but a right bad egg. Got out of prison last May, and by the end of the month, him and my Bridie was stuck together like they’d been glued. Can’t imagine what she seen in him.”

“The state prison in Charlestown?” Nell asked.

Mrs. Fallon nodded. Her husband said, “It’s just down the road from the mill there.”

“Why do you ask?” Viola wanted to know.

Because that’s where Duncan is.
Nell smoothed her skirts, hearing Duncan’s most recent letter to her, the one that came last Friday when she was wearing this same dress, crackle in her pocket. “No particular reason.”

“Don’t see how you can call him handsome,” said Mr. Hines, “what with them stars on his forehead.”

“Stars?” Nell asked.

“He was in the Navy during the war,” Mrs. Fallon explained. “Got one of them, what do you call ‘em, where they prick a pitcher into your skin.”

“A tattoo,” Viola said. “Seamen like to get them.”

“Yes, I know, on their arms,” Nell said. “But the
forehead?
”

Mrs. Fallon shrugged. “Like I says, I got no idea what she seen in him.”

“How old is she?” Nell asked.

“Twenty-one.”

“And she lives with you?”

Mrs. Fallon said “Yes,” Mr. Fallon “No.”

Nell cocked her head, as if to ask,
Which is it?

Darting a look at her husband, Mrs. Fallon said, “She did live in Boston for a while—the North End—but she’s been back home all summer.”

“Because of Mr. Hines?” Nell asked. “To be near him?”

“I reckon,” Mrs. Fallon answered after a short pause.

Nell said, “I assume, Mrs. Fallon, that if the police believe your daughter ran off with Mr. Hines, that he’s gone, too.”

“No one’s seen him round Charlestown the past few days,” Mrs. Fallon replied, “but that don’t mean Bridie run off with him—least, not of her own accord. She’s a good girl, she is. Deep down.”

That met with a dubious little grunt from Liam Fallon. Ignoring it—or too distressed to notice—his wife said, “My Bridie, she’s got the prettiest red hair you ever seen—shines like heaven itself when the sun hits it just right. Big green eyes, pink cheeks... If something’s happened to her...” She lowered her head, dabbing her face with the wadded-up handkerchief, her shoulders shaking.

Her husband plucked a tea sandwich from the stack on the table in front of him and pried it open, critically examining its contents.

Just as Nell was about to rise from her chair to go comfort the poor woman, Gracie said, “Why you cwyin’?” She crossed to Mrs. Fallon, baby doll in tow. “It’s all wight,” she soothed. “Don’t cwy. Here, you want to hold Hortense?”

She offered the doll to the weeping woman, who accepted it in that instinctively maternal way some women had, automatically supporting its little head as she held it to her shoulder. “This is just how my Bridie felt,” she said tremulously, “when she was little like this, all heavy and soft. My other babes, they was all sickly. Wasn’t none of ‘em lived very long. But that Bridie, she was as hale and hearty as they come.”

“Good girl,” Nell mouthed to Gracie as the child settled back down with her other dolls.

“When the Fallons realized Harry wasn’t going to help them,” Viola told Nell, “they decided to go to Mr. Hewitt himself.”

“We went down to that building near India Wharf where he has his office,” Mrs. Fallon said as she patted the doll’s back, “but he wouldn’t see us. Sent some fella out to swat us away. Fella said if Mr. Harry didn’t think there was nothin’ to be done, then there was nothin’ to be done. I asked him what Mr. Hewitt would do if it was
his
child that disappeared, but he said I was bein’...somethin’...”

“Important,” her husband offered through a mouthful of food.

“Impertinent?” Viola ventured.

“That’s it. He walked us out of the building and told us not to come back.”

“How dweadfully savage,” Gracie said.

All eyes turned to her.

“Come here, buttercup.” Gracie climbed onto the lap of her governess, who whispered into her ear, “It
is
dreadfully savage, but you must remember not to speak when the adults are having a conversation.”

“Mrs. Fallon thought if she came here,” Viola said, “and appealed to me as a mother, that she might find a more sympathetic ear.”